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ARTIST IN FOCUS: An In-Depth Interview with the artist, LANA GENTRY !!!   RARE and NEW!

THE CANVAS OF ME

(painter Iain Whittaker interviews Lana Gentry)

"My content, my style, my history, all make me what I am... an outsider.
It's
dirty, but I can't wash it off." Lana Gentry


Lana Gentry, a disarming shiva of talent, has a truly extraordinary tale to tell. If there is to be a continued renaissance of outsiders, we need people who are perfectly capable of representing themselves, who can make the cut without silver spoons and the hallmarks of formal education. After I was interviewed by Lana Gentry for Beinart.org ,
I decided to turn the tables:



IW. Abounding with symbolism and loaded with references it is clear that your imagery has many layers of meaning and complex personal relevance. Can you guide us through the details of your self portrait(?) with the the butterfly overhead?

I am intrigued by the potential meanings of features like the boxed X, arteries writhing and melding with vegetative tendrils (eat your steroidal, sensorial immersion heart out Mr Cameron) and that gnarled tree with its silhouetted figures taking root on the girl's shoulder.

LG~ Self portrait? Yes...it is, or at least symbolically so. In fact all my
images containing the crossed forehead are in some way autobiographical in nature, as I have a couple of scars there, which in the right light creates a shadowed cross. The boxed 'x' is a rune symbol relating to relationships. . The rooted aspect in my work often but not always, implies some sense of paralyisis. This piece of which you speak, titled 'Reap' inidicates the crippling existence of codependancy and dependancy.

Its title and content are the cautionary tale of reaping what one has sewn. The severed arms indicate helplessness and the open vessels become root like. Arms are generally free and helpful, but these arms are the monsters of self crippling attachment. They represent my failed relationships. Roots imply stability or sameness. This is shown in my piece 'Rooted' a portrait of artist and musican Wes Freed... where they are positive, but the fixed nature of roots can have double meaning. Fixed can be good or not good. When I present images of my being rooted, or trees being rooted to me, I am expressing what seems to be irrevocable. It represents attachment...connection...dependancy. I am not applying this merely to intimacy but in every sense... to all familial and friendly connections to those with whom I have in the course of my life become unhealthily and codependantly attached. This is having to do with roots growing into tissue or ground, and my own feeling of being a toxic person. The piece is about that macabre dance that exists between two dependants, and mostly about what it feels like to be one of them. I am harvesting, but harvesting the withering unconstituted 'fruits' of darkness that I have planted myself.

IW. Many of your portraits of others involve the wearing of what appears to be historic folk costumes, sometimes decorated with telling symbols like upsidedown hearts.

Can you explain the personal significance of the ongoing presence of these dresses?

LG~When I turn anything upside down in my work, be it a cross, a rune stone, anything really, I have reversed it's meaning, as is seen in 'Reap' with upside down heart buttons. Love turned upside down.I suppose I have always been drawn to Victorian imagery since childhood in part because of the magnificent details.

The other aspects which appeal to me have to do with the talismans of death represented in Victorianism. I love mourning jewelry and vintage clothing.

Thereis a darkness there that is difficult to imulate in the modern sense because it was not merely an artistic expression, it was a way of life. Death was made fashionable. It's fashion reflected a real sense of unbearable sorrow and depression to which I can sometimes relate.


I have a profound respect for eccentric designer Edith Head, Valentino and Vivien Westwood. A lot of what I find in my art though, has more to do with doll dresses of the antique variety. I was very poor as a child and found an antique doll collection in the attic of an old house where we moved. I think the fascination started there. I was deeply attached to the collection, and thought that they were sent to me by God. There was a plethora of composition and storybook dolls that spoke to me both figuratively and literally in my child mind's eye. They were a very comforting aspect of my childhood. Consequently, I tend to use a lot of those sorts of dresses and costumes in my work.


IW. You have previously declared a fascination with dress forms/fashion. Who or what are your greatest influences in this direction?

Well I named some influences above in the way of fashion, but I also I really related to a lot of the style presented in the early videos of Marilyn Manson.

Idon't know that he influenced me so much but t I really understood and
identified with the style. I love flea markets, abandoned lots of old goods. I always loved the images of dressforms, corsets, body braces, prosthetics, old medical journals, old paper, faded fabric, wallpaper and so on.


Dress forms are creepy because they look like disembodied women. When you put corsets and vintage clothing on them, they are even weirder. I am fascinated by how much they tend to disturb me. I used a dress form in my piece 'Paine Pazu in an Organic Dressform in the Garden of Miabelle'. Because I loved dress forms but also because model Paine Pazu was genderless in a weird way to me. I did this
with her as a mermaid too. So that's why I did that dress form piece with her.

Iwanted to render her without the possibility of genitals. I displayed her
without those roles because she was a non gendered chameleon to me. She was/is an enigma, but again, the forms themselves really bother me. They are torsos.

The absence of arms, legs and heads are visually shocking and tend to send the imagination running to places it doesn't necessarily want to go. My imagination will always follow the sign that says do not enter. I will always go....mentally. If I see a millipede, my mind jumps to what it would be like to have that millipede all over me...biting me. If I see a vat of maggots, I will immediately feel them on my face and in my mouth. I cannot escape my own neurosis, so I just embrace the serpent and try to create. Such is true with my dress from fascination. They scare me terribly, and so I draw them.

IW. Your centralised, often near symmetrical compositions with full frontal stares engender a magical and charm-like resonance suggestive of an alternative spiritual dimension within an ongoing internal dialogue. Even though hands might be cut off, or wounds exposed, there is something protective and atropaic about your images (which makes me think of the tradition of warding against the 'evil eye'). A subliminal dialogue that recognises the powers of attraction and repulsion inherent in a confrontational image also appears ever present. What do
you make of the protective (or alternatively exposing) qualities of art and the possible spiritual interpretations people may bring to your work?

LG~ People often refer to my work as spiritual and I think they have a deep sense of how personal it is. People know when I portrait them that it's not just gonna be an image of them, but a story...their story. Perhaps they feel the work is protective or intuitive because my works are wrought with familiar spiritual symbolism. I love to feel my subjects.
There is a key to each of my works that I try and include with each piece.
These works of mine are much like advent calenders, containing little symbols that are doors to be opened to those who want to find the meaning beneath. As far as true spirituality goes, I am not a fan of organized religion for the disheartening and confusing reasons of my youth. Organized religion for me personally was confining, restrictive, judgemental, mind fucking, archaic, and anti-self. I did not identify with it then, and I still do not identify with it, although I am deeply spiritual, whatever that means and find the kingdom of God within me. Organized religion, or any tale of imposed sacrifice is at the base of all things evil. I respect and have no prejudice against those who practice any peaceful form of religion, but I think it's probably pretty rare. I am deeply spiritual, but in the conventional and political sense of the word, I am an atheist.

IW. A strong compulsion to revisit and possibly revoke or neutralise various harsh and judgemental experiences seems to underlie several of your images and writings. In what ways has art and poetry been personally liberating for you?

LG~ Well it is liberating and as you have pointed out because there is a
working out of how others feel about me and vice versa.. Only really though, in the sense that I work all things out in my art that affect me deeply. I've been injured by things people have said about my art and about me personally.

Renowned philosopher and author Leonard Peikoff, intellectual heir and best friend to philosopher Ayn Rand ( also head of the Ayn Rand Institute) injured me quite deeply when he called my portrait of Ayn Rand ugly and reprehensible some time back. This triggered my piece 'Ugly and Reprehensible' which was a vulgar creative explorative reply to that accusation. I tried to rise to the definition in that piece. Dr. Peikoff had called my work 'reprehensible', which infers moral corruption, for simply rendering my favorite writer and felt that my homage was not worthy of her greatness. Oddly, it was one of my more benign works, lacking any sexual, political or religious connotation, short of my symbolism which he clearly misunderstood. I found his near religious regard for Rand, an atheist, to be quite strange. He was cruel.

This actually made me cry. I am not academic in any sense. People tend to criticize me a lot from an academic perspective in terms of my art. I am completely self educated. I have been injured by people I saw as more important than me. He was one. This was followed by an interesting experience with neighbor and indie
film maker Ron Smith ( Hasil Adkins, My Blue Star) who is a fascinating
character himself. He was instrumental in making me understand that people would always criticize and misinterpret me in life, and that the level of intelligence and success of Dr. Peikoff, did not make him worthy of proclaiming my creative impotence. Furthermore, if anything he said, it was cause for celebration that I had affected him at all. This really changed my way of thinking.. If my work was gonna be called ugly and reprehensible as benign as it was, then fuck it.

Balls to the wall. What would happen if it really was ugly and reprehensible?

I've also gotten a lot ofmisunderstanding in terms of how I use my own image to express myself. Some people think I am more focused on me than my art. I don't really see any difference between the two in truth. One day I may be expressing myself in the written word, another day it may be my music, or my art or in some cases it is also expressed through the image of my face. They are all valid forms of expression. These forms of expression do indeed liberate me, even if only for a
moment. Professor Peikoff in his intense and cruel delivery of criticizing my work, exalted me to higher ground and improved me, more than anything ever could have. He liberated me from the confines of fearing what others might think, and provoked artists like Ron Smith to make me dig inside myself to find out why I allowed it hurt me so much.

IW. One of the most impressive aspects of your poetry to me personally is the fact that I can never disbelieve a word you write. I'm totally in awe of this sense of authenticity. What role does fiction have in the poetic heart of Lana Gentry?

LG~ Thank you for your generous eloquence. Poetic license would be the only fiction generally found in my writing. I use a lot of metaphor. I loved the work of Emily Dickinson for this very reason. Metaphors were always prevalent, as they were when she so mournfully expressed the cleaving of her unstable mind in the presented context of sewing. Matching the seams of her mind, and watching skeens of yarn roll across the floor that were would be connectors. This is both
literal and figurative all at once being so obvious that it was what it was. It was a mental break, a discombobulation expressed in dark surreal
representation.

I love poetry.General fiction finds me bored. I have always been a fan of non fiction and do not read fiction with the exception of a few favorites like The Fountainhead.

Even here, Ayn Rand uses the vehicle of fiction to present ideas and scenarios to properly express her philosophy. I most often find interest only in fiction that seems to have a purpose. My poetry is a portal through I pour my pain.

Once locked into the ink, I am in some way safer. My poetry is indeed
authentic.

I do not expound about unfamiliar conditions. I expound about 'my' conditions.

I was also always drawn to true crime, biographies, autobiographies, and even detective magazines from my youth, which I would hide like pornography within other books, with a clear understanding of their incorrectness for little girls.

My poetry, art and all of my creations are seen and described as fantasy but to me, they are clearly symbolic, metaphoric and non fictional at their base. The presentation may be poetic or visually embellished, but the work almost always comes from a truth in my life. I do not draw or write fantasy gratuitously as a rule. If there is for instance, a unicorn in my work, that unicorn means something. So to answer the question more directly, fiction plays only a minor role in my work or life.


IW. Do you like the country-side? If you could live anywhere, what would be your ideal place/environment?

LG~ I was raised some in the country around my grandmother who worked in a cotton mill her whole life as a spinner. I've always thought in terms of survival with little preference to whereabouts. I need a room, my pencils and paper, a humble medium that was/is always available to me. Although I suppose a field of lavender in someplace like a country-side might be nice . I'm content anywhere though, so long as I have my instruments.


IW. You've written, “I hadn't the luxury of too many mistakes given my unchosen autonomy”. This statement makes me feel for your younger self. Can you tell us more about this experience and the impact potential freefall has on creative development and life in general?

LG~ I was let loose into the world at a young age after the premature death of my mother...who was mentally ill, and often suicidal. Much of my life, she underwent extreme treatments, hospitalizations and was once in a long term coma from a traumatic attempted suicide. She was like this her whole life. Still, she represented some kind of bastardized stability for me. Her death was traumatic.

I was with her. My father was a convict turned Pentecostal minister of a cult type church for years, who returned to a life of crime and then prison again ultimately. We were isolated and controlled. He had marital relations and children with both my mother and her sister. My life was complicated and wrought with little support early on. It was in some vague way of explaining it, a polygamist type situation at least in the sense of his going back and forth between my mother and her sister. He married each eventually at different times. Two of my siblings were adopted out within the family. My existing brother turned to opiates when I was 8. This was another ongoing heartache. There was a lot of violence in my home. I can only say without being too self pitying, that my life was extremely hard at certain turns. I've been cold, I've been hungry, I've been abused and I've been neglected. Call theWahhhhhhhh-ambulance. lol I have survived it.


The potential effect of freefall on creativity? I've no way of really knowing whether I would have been this artistic and expressive if I had been born with a silver spoon in my mouth or just into a normal family, if there's such a thing.

We all have a cross to carry... every one of us, and some are heavier than was mine.. Sometimes I think I would have been more developed had I more options.

Other times I think my extreme of creativity would not have existed at all had it not been for my experiences in life. I do not know. Therefore I can really have no regret I suppose. I couldn't change it even if I did. At least though I've reached a point in life that I feel no need to hide it. I am like a folk artist. I am fully self taught, apart from any knowledge of honed or academic work, which I spent many years envying. I think one can see that in my work. I'm rogue and rustic. I suppose it's affected the 'way' I create...yes, because I express my feelings which have been very dark at certain intervals and still are. I am affected by it all... everything. My content, my style, my history, all make me what I am... an outsider. It's dirty, but I can't wash it off.

IW. What happened to Frank?

LG~WOW. You know about 'Frank'. My father Landron had an alias of Frank when he was on the lam from the FBI for the distribution of drugs. I could not call him dad in public. I could only call him Frank. He lived in the attic at my aunt's by candlelight for a few years and I would secretly visit him there. If we went out by night, I would only call him Frank. When he dealt drugs for survival, he used the alias of Frank for that also. His life was hard. He found his mother dead in bed from cirrhosis when she was 36. He was very affected and also very affecting. Still... I will occasionally see someone who will ask me, “How’s your father Frank?" He is well for a man of his history, now living in Baltimore among other mad Irishmen. He is still difficult, creative, argumentative, brilliant and sometimes paranoid. He is healthy but missing a part of his arm and hand he lost when he shot it off accidentally with a high powered weapon. He is an impossible character ripping with intelligent neurosis. He's indescribable really. He has the all the charismatic charm and cult of personality that you would find in Jim Jones or Charles Manson. In some ways I think I thank my parents for sentencing me to a childhood of creative escape.


IW. How did your impressive collection of portraits by others start? How
important to you as creative agent is the projection of a narcissistic edge, humour, and an audience self?

LG~ I did some 'modelling' as a young woman, and at 5'3 with gapped teeth even that was damned lucky I reckon. lol


My image was not used again until I started to use the avenue of social
networking to advertise my art and thoughts a few years ago. At this time, my first portrait online was created by a myspace muse named Paine Pazu, who had been heavily portraited herself. I returned the favor and then forged a wonderful kindred and friendship. I was incredibly flattered. At the time I was also simultaneously being used as a model in the work of brilliant outsider artist Donnie Green. I posted these to MySpace. It seemed to go from that point in a direction that was quite weird. I would befriend people and they would ask to portrait me.

Sometimes I had sketched them. Sometimes it was spawned of friendship, sometimes of fan-ship and other times because I guess my page began receiving a lot of attention, which I think was good for artists to present their styles through the canvas of me. Some are trying their hands at what they see has become a competitionperhaps...among themselves. I became an advertising vehicle too in a way I guess. These are my thoughts anyway when I ponder the whys. I was never the most beautiful, but very interactive and symbiotic with other artists. Since
then so many gifted artists of different mediums like Michael Gancarz, Robert Bauder, Buddy Nestor, Gareth Swift, Kristy Evans, Jeff Kromer, Ruben Marcos and so many more have
been generous enough to include me in their amazing bodies of work. Wish I could name them all, but I've gotten into the hundreds now. The main thing I would like to say is this. I don't generally ask for them, or ever pay for them. This is imagined by most but completely untrue. I've only asked 2 or 3 of times for portraiture in my life and one of those times I was turned down...so I stopped after that. lol. I see my portrait collection not so much as images of me, but as images that represent the work of the artists who have portraited me. It's become a database in a way. It says a lot about them, as well as me and I am grateful for every single one.


To answer the second part, humour is very important. I love humour.
Narcissism...hmmmm. It's not important that people see me with a narcissistic edge, but they do. I always want to say to people , " Others portraiting ME doesn't make ME narcissistic. It's not like I'm portraiting myself.", but then I stop and go oh wait... I AM portraiting myself also. lol The next thought then becomes, Well Rembrandt, Warhol, Kahlo, Close, El Greco, Coleman, Dali, , DaVinci, have all portraited themselves and so many others have too! " I am not a narcissist, I am not a narcissist, I am not a narcissist." ...and I say this as I lean over a pond while staring at my own reflection. hahahaha!

People who do not know me will always project things onto me that are simply not true. It does bother me. It hurts me very deeply. I wish it didn't. For every portrait seen, there is a matching piece of hate mail, gossip, or criticism that aims to derail my sense of self. I shouldn't define myself by any of it, but I do. I also want to say that if being a narcissist means focusing on one's self to the neglect of others, then I do not fit the definition. I am obsessed with all art, including my own.


IW. What projects are currently on the boil in the Gentry world?

LG~ I just finished an interview with Neo Grotesque painter Buddy Nestor for Beinart.org I have one coming to SurrealismNow.com with genius assembler Kris Kuksi. I admire both of these artists a lot and felt honoured to be associated with them in any way. I also have other interviews on the desk yet to be realized. I have a gig showing my art this month for The Little Ozzfest, an outsider's extravaganza, and more outsider shows planned for the year. I just finished illustrating a cd cover for the raw Americana outsider Robert Earl Reed's 'Carlene'. I'll
also be participating in BlackMass's collaborative show Opus Diaboli ' The Possession' scheduled some time next year and of course... I am on the brink of receiving some additional images of myself from all over the world including the ones coming from campy Italian painter Massimo DePace, beautiful and mindblowing surreal illustrator and Beinart artist Janelle McKain, and one from modern Wyeth-like genius of the paint, Pamela Wilson. She is an incredibly brave and insidiously dark master whose organic palette and perfect execution find her among the very best there is. I'm proud to call her friend. I look forward to these interpretations of me.

Thanks Iain so much for taking the time to get to know me. Was great to be interviewed by such a talent as yourself.